1989
I haven’t stood in the turret in over a decade, and the last time I was in this spot, B.B. was in my arms. Her little body hot and sleepy. I knew then that she was neither an Elizabeth nor an Olivia Rose—no woman so easily trapped by a man. Nor would she be her father—the Volt men are evil in ways even I don’t understand. In this spot, a smoothed indent in the wooden floorboards where insistence found a place to wait and watch, I swore to Beatrice that she would inherit the fortitude of Eileen Fowler. The sister who stood guard. Kept an eye on the island. Did what was necessary to keep its secrets hidden.
The quarry would have looked so different to Eileen Fowler. It would have been alive with workers. Men hollering, dynamite blasts rattling glass. Eileen was said to sit on the Watch Tower, the tall stack of stones off in the distance and to my right, every evening after the workers left—as regular as my run—so that her sister could see her from just this very spot.
After marrying Seth, Elizabeth had gotten pregnant almost right away, disappearing into the house. Eileen had gone to the front door many times, knocking and asking for her sister, begging for Seth to let her in or Elizabeth out. Begging Elizabeth to fight. Seth had turned Eileen away every time, offering little to no information. It is said that one night Seth woke, unsure why, and wandered to a window. Outside in the dark, Eileen stood with lantern held high as if waiting to lock eyes with him, and when she did, every window in the house shattered, as if Eileen had willed it so. Seth blacked out, glass cutting his face, and when he came to, Eileen was on the third floor, her knuckles raw from trying to reach her sister under the thin crack of the door. Elizabeth would not come out.
The woman that went missing last night was in her twenties. The younger they are, the more it bothers me, and this was a sloppy job. Different from usual. There isn’t usually so much blood to clean up. I traced her footsteps this morning, as I always do, cleaning up whatever I found along the way, erasing her wherever I could. The harbor master said she was crying as she stepped off the ferry, and the innkeeper says she didn’t offer much besides a first name and some cash. The dead should be remembered. But not here. Not on Fowler. Here it is my job to help them fade, and it isn’t usually hard, making the sad and lonely vanish.
This is what I know. The island reaches out, sends its echoey call like a heartbeat to the mainland. Someone catches that beat. Sadness attracts sadness. Women arrive. Women jump. Their bodies are never found.
Their remnants are kept in the basement of the museum—earrings and flip-flops and sweatshirts. The things they leave behind, the identifying pieces like wallets and photographs and journals, are burned in the quarry, and the ashes spread into the Killing Pond. The best funeral I can offer. These women show up on their own. Their commonality a sadness and loneliness that predates the island and makes them delicious. Grief is very filling.
“Sonia?” Carrie hollers to me from the first floor. Her voice floats up the stairwell, sounding as if it is coming from a much greater distance than two flights of stairs. I imagine the sound of her, my lover, skittering across the surface of water. A smooth rock in flight just before it sinks. She thinks she can take both girls from me. Leave me here all alone. She’s stronger than I thought, but she is still stupid enough to underestimate me. She does not respect or understand the bond I have with Beatrice or how much I want to be a part of this house even if that means destroying it.
Of course, I have underestimated Carrie as well. I see that clearly now. She is no trapped woman—she’s taken care of her body, her life. She was ready to wield the ax I brought her, no questions asked. She poisoned James before I even showed up—he’s passed out in his office. I peeked when I first arrived. He was snoring, still is. If I focus, I can hear him even now. His ragged breath in, like he’s not getting enough air, and the slow whistle out. I’d thought I was using her to get back inside this house, but she was already ready to open the door to me and hand over the keys. I didn’t even have to ask.
“Sonia?” she calls up to me again, her question skipping around Quarry Hollow before it finds the attic. I recall all the times she’s whispered to me in the dark. Her body warming my bed. Her giggle, never frivolous, always a victory. The times she let me comfort her, her breath short and shallow before the calm.
“Are you ignoring me?” Carrie asks, starting up the stairs.
“I’m coming down,” I say. “Wait.”
“You have to see what I’ve found…”
For years now, I’ve watched Carrie try to love this house. To convince herself she could. That she’s meant to. I wonder how it never occurred to me that the house and I have this in common—Carrie’s desire to love us is stronger than her actual love. If that’s true, the house and I deserve each other. I could be queen of this castle.
“This porch is great, don’t you think?” Carrie asked me that first day I met her.
I had not planned to be seen. I’d done a good job steering clear once James arrived back on island with a new wife. I walked away from B.B., knowing that I’d seen in her what Millie saw in me. I’d connected with that tiny part of her brain that would grow into Curator, make the island her dollhouse. Time apart from her, from the house, could not break that bond. So, I let her go as best I could, but on sunny days, when the island had grown beautiful and restless with spring, I would run by Quarry Hollow, even get as close as the sidewalk, waiting for the day Beatrice would ask for my help. On this day, it was Carrie who waved good morning and stopped me in my tracks.
“It’s original to the house,” I offer. “The porch, I mean.” A silly thing to say, so clear is it that the house has been built to show off this very porch. Plus, nothing about Quarry Hollow looks new or fresh or otherwise renovated. If I wasn’t feeling so tongue-tied, I’d point out its faults, like how the porch roof was built too high and too wide, resulting in a first floor that is far too dark.
“I’m Carrie by the way,” she says and steps down to shake my hand.
“Sonia.” I don’t want to touch her, not yet, so I wave at her instead, staying where I am. She accepts this bit of awkwardness with grace. “I jog past here a lot. Also, I run the Island Museum.”
“You helped with Beatrice. I’ve heard about you.”
“Ahhhh,” I say. I have never known what to say when someone says they’ve heard about you. It’s a strange thing to offer, as if you are automatically supposed to get what it is they understand about you.
“Beatrice talks about you. Calls you Ya-Ya. James had to explain to me that comes from trying to say Son-Ya.”
“I’ve tried to give you space. I didn’t want to intrude or confuse things.”
“You wouldn’t be intruding.” She laughs. The laugh is tight. A little stress in it, and I feel proud to notice. “Beatrice doesn’t much like me, between you and me. Also, this house is haunted.” Her face turns red. I study her eyes, her embarrassed smile, and see that she isn’t serious. She hasn’t heard the ghosts. She is just afraid of the old house. Unnerved.
“B.B.,” I say.
“What?”
“We call her B.B. for Baby Beatrice or Beatrice Bethany. She likes the nickname ’cause she can say it.”
“See! B.B. and Ya-Ya. You should come by.”
“I’m here now,” I say, and gesture at myself like I am a letter Vanna White is about to turn on Wheel of Fortune. The silence between us is momentarily nice, but I can feel it growing too wide, so I add, “Come by the museum.”
“Really?”
“Of course! I can teach you about this island. The house even, and I’m renovating the museum—it was the first meetinghouse on the island—so we can talk about house projects too.”
“James doesn’t like to talk about anything like that.”
“Like what?”
“The island. History. His ancestors. I don’t know. Any of it. Anyway”—she clears her throat and points up at the porch ceiling—“I read that porches like this should have a light blue ceiling, to emulate the sky.”
“We could do that.” I immediately go red. I’ve said we as if there is such a thing. “I mean, the island hardware store carries paint. And I could help.”
She looks at me, surprised. I think, at first, that she is mad, but then she smiles and I know. I know that I’m going to fall for her. That she will be my first love. Her blue eyes almost clear in the sun. Her hair flouncing around her, and her small white teeth. I want to leap forward and begin, but I remember she is married. She is not mine. Not yet.
“I got to go,” I say. I wave her away this time and turn on my heels. I am gone without looking back.
When I first knew the house, Beatrice was my focus. My everything. That love affair also began on the front porch. James answering the door, B.B. in his arms, her face covered with tears and snot. He looked ragged. His face not so different from his child’s.
“I’m here to help if I can.”
James smelled terrible, unwashed; his breath was so fierce I could smell it with his mouth closed. “What do you know about babies?” He was too tired to be as fierce as he wanted. “And since when does the Island Curator come in the house?”
“Rules are made to be broken,” I offer lamely.
I was too busy trying not to look eager to step into the house to be clever. It had always been a dream of mine—to get in that house—ever since Ms. Millie told me it was off-limits to Curators: “Eileen was the last of us to go inside, and it weakened her, took away much of her strength. No one has dared go inside since.” I could see the dullness of the house behind his back. The drab wallpaper, the unpolished floors. I could smell the dust of it all, a smell that comes from windows always staying closed.
“I don’t know anything about babies, but I’m smart and kind and no one else is gonna offer.”
We set up a crib in the piano room, and I cared for B.B. more than anyone else, including James, in that two years before Carrie arrived. I learned to love the sound of James’s snoring, because it meant I was still needed. That I could stay in the house bundled up with B.B. for a while longer, whispering to her the island lore so that it would live inside her, connect to her on a cellular level.
“It’s insane! You have to see,” Carrie says, pulling me into the downstairs hallway and away from all my memories.
The ax lies on the floor, covered in white. I can see where she swung so hard that it hit not just the wall under the stairs but also behind her. I notice the wet rings of sweat under her armpits. The dampness of her shirt under her breasts.
“It goes and goes,” she says, but I haven’t finished processing how large a space she’s opened up. The horsehair plaster pokes out from behind the wallpaper at the edges. It’s a wide space too, as if she’s expected us to walk through it, side by side. “There should be a stud or a support beam here,” she says, pointing to the middle of the wide space. “It’s not like Sheetrock. Horsehair plaster has to have something to stick to. None of this should have been able to stand on its own.”
“Have you stepped inside it yet?” I ask her. “Like actually looked around in there?”
“I tried. But I can barely bring myself to keep my eyes on it. Let alone step through.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s not that I’m afraid. I mean, that’s not what’s stopping me. It’s that I can’t go through. My body won’t do it. I don’t know. Try it.”
“Fuck that,” I say, already daring myself to look. The blackness is thorough, infinite, as if the light from the hallway can’t even touch it.
“Before I broke through, I swear I heard water. Like I was about to hit a pipe or something. Now though … nothing.”
And “nothing” seems right. A big black hole devoid of color yet full of depth.
“Come on.” I latch on to her arm, maybe a little afraid that she won’t follow me if I don’t hold on. “Let’s try to go through.”
“I’m telling you, we can’t—”
Before she can finish, I step through, and it is like the sensation of dropping into the quarry pond. The water warmer at the surface but cold coming up from the underneath. My right hand is still on her arm. My skin burns a little, the bit that is out in the hallway, but I’m scared to let go of her, and I can hear her far away telling me to come back, asking me what I see, telling me she can’t follow.
In the dark, I hear voices. The whisper and swish of people talking over and under one another, a cascade of eager words, and none of them are for me.
I let go of Carrie. Her body is so far from mine, and I feel myself a part of the house.
I turn my body in the dark, float, breath held.
“Hello.” It comes out of me a burble, like I am deep in the quarry pond, and my word is bubbling up toward the surface, dead before anyone will hear it.
Hundreds of voices reach for mine, screaming and begging and rushing at me. They know my name. They scream it: Sonia! Sonia! Sonia! They are angry with me. They say, We know what you did. You hid us away. You burned the last bits of us when you could have told our story. I want to tell them that isn’t what I did: I cleaned up, kept the island safe, and I hid your shame! Your final weakness erased. They do not like this. They scream at me louder. They shout in anger at me, at Millie, at Alice, Nora, and Eileen. They want to be pulled free, but they are on my back, pulling at my short hair, begging me to get them out, and I am going down, down, down. I cannot breathe. Somewhere below me I feel an opening. A drain that will pull me in. If I sink that low, go through, I will never come back. My hand swims away from me, my arm reaching for Carrie, but there is no surface. Only swamp. But, suddenly, through the screams and pleas and panic, I feel Carrie pulling me toward her. Out into the hallway, the house solidifying. All of it real again in the right ways, and I am on the ground, on my hands and knees, spitting up water. Gallons gush out of me.
“Sonia,” Carrie is saying. Her right hand is on my lower back, and her left hand around my arm. The feel of the wooden floorboards under my palms is cool and solid and strong, and I never, ever want to stop feeling it. So much so that when the water stops coming up, I push my belly down onto the floorboards. Lay my whole self down and turn my head away from the black pit so that I can rest my cheek on the floor.
She has kept her hands on me, one finding an opening between the waist of my jeans and my shirt. Her warmth is keeping me present. “I couldn’t get in, it wouldn’t let me through, and then all of a sudden it did, and I just stepped through, and it was like I was walking into a closet, nothing weird about it at all, and you were just standing there with your back to me, your head kind of tilted into your chest, and I kept saying your name and you wouldn’t move. You wouldn’t.”
“I was in there with something. With a thousand somethings. They wanted me to pull them out, but they were pulling me under,” I say, and sit up slowly, risking the loss of her touch.
“Sonia,” she says. The concern on her face is mixed with fear. “You were gone a long time.”
“I walked in. You pulled me out. A minute? Five at most, right?”
“Well, I was freaking out, so I didn’t time it, but it was more like half an hour.”
My heart hurts in my chest, all those screams still inside me. What have I done? I ask myself. A different interior voice answers, What you had to. What you’ll do again.
And then B.B.’s voice. Familiar but also snarled and new and too loud, shouting, “What the fuck did you do?”
B.B. is in the doorway. Her little-girl body shaking and wet. Water drips off her hair and clothes. She is barefoot, half-naked.
“Beatrice,” Carrie says.
It all happens so quickly. The rage. B.B. in the doorway with a sky behind her that is darkening, moving past evening. Her breathing the word “Run” just before she launches herself past Carrie and me, toward the kitchen. She must pass the dark hole of the hallway to get to the kitchen, and Carrie and I watch as the darkness stretches toward B.B., reaching out with dark arms, and Carrie gasps, reaches toward B.B. too, as if to save her, but I grab on to Carrie’s arm and hold her still. The darkness is not a threat. Not to B.B. I don’t know how I know this, but I know it means to save her. But in that moment, two things happen. First, the darkness misses B.B. as she moves into the kitchen, and second, something horrible and darker than the hole in the house looms.
It’s Henrie. She fills the front doorway. A good distance behind her, Toast is barking, a noise too loud for his little body, and I know right away he is barking at her. At Henrie, who doesn’t quite look like Henrie. It looks like some warped version of her. Some version that is so full of anger and wrath that all her edges have sharpened. Her cheekbones like blades. Her mouth somehow too full of teeth. Her elbows twitched out from her sides at harsh angles.
“Henrie? What’s going—”
Carrie is midsentence when Henrie flies forward. Leaps. Launches off her back legs. On instinct, I pull Carrie to the floor with me, and Henrie is in the air above us, somehow leaping through the hall toward the kitchen, graceful if there wasn’t something so grotesque about the length of her limbs.
The darkness that had been reaching out from the house to cradle B.B. is still there, and it hugs itself around Henrie instead, yanking her from midair and sucking her into the hold under the stairs. Her body slipping through and under like all those winter nightmares I used to have of dropping baby B.B. under the ice of Lake Erie. Her little body slapping through a weak spot only to begin to slide away underneath, clawing to get to me as the water moves her back and forth, just out of reach.
Carrie is about to follow Henrie through. Drop her whole body in. I know, somehow, that it will let her through this time, so I focus. Picture the wall solid again, begin with the dust and mess on the floor around us and reassemble it. Will the tiny pieces back into place until the wall is back. Fully formed with its yellowed flowers and ugly blue background. There is no sign of Carrie’s work.
B.B. rushes forward, back into the hall from the kitchen, pressing her palms to the solid wall. Carrie does the same, wailing.
Inside the wall, I hear something that sounds like Henrie. A long cackle, a gurgle, a swallowing of plaster and blood and decades of disappearance.